


Lacuna

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Case Fic, Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 06:58:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 19,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3125246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully explores her feelings after Milagro while investigating a murder. This ends in an RST place despite evidence to the contrary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to The Right Honorable Fangirls Drinking and Debating Society for the encouragement, to Maybe Amanda for being an outstanding beta and person in general, to wendelah1 for having a kind and nurturing spirit far beyond that which I deserve, and to fuckyeahdavidgillian for sucking me back in.
> 
> The word lacuna means a missing piece or unfilled space, and is also the Spanish word for crib.
> 
> The case file was inspired by Hinzelmann in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

The man has fat slabby cheeks like an overgrown baby, which make his small, piggy eyes look smaller and piggier. He wears sweatpants and two plaid flannel shirts layered over one another, revealing only a glimpse of the Led Zeppelin shirt underneath. It’s a familiar variation on the autumnal couture of transients everywhere.

A segment of intestine peeks from beneath the t-shirt, as he has been impaled with two long spears and one has pushed some of his innards outward beneath his rib cage. Scully, crouching in the leaves, sniffs and detects nothing but the cold flat scent of dried blood. The bowel has not been perforated this time, only snagged on the downstroke. She is aware of the cops around this little tableau, they form a semicircle like children at a play and mumble amongst themselves.

She hears the soft rustle of writhing maggots and, prodding a bit, finds a mass of them inside the gash beneath the man’s chins. The thin leather cord is buried deep, like the others. “First instars, maybe a few seconds,” she says to Mulder, scrutinizing a maggot on her glove. “Given the cool weather, he’s been here maybe five days.” Five days ago she had a dead man’s hands ripping out her heart, there must have been something in the air. She wipes the larva on the grass and considers the abdominal wounds. Scully adds to his injuries by burying a digital probe thermometer deep into the man’s liver, though she knows the readings will not be helpful.

One of the cops says something, she hears anger in it. Something about the missing boy, about the kid in the red jacket whom no one can seem to find. She and Mulder have tracked the tiny son of a bitch through three states in as many months and he disappears like a dream at sunrise.

The cool breeze wafts the cops’ discussion her way.

“Fucking FBI,” says one. “A dick and a chick. Lookit Clarice fucking Starling over there, Jesus.”

“I’ll take her if you don’t want her, Tim. I could put her in my pocket.”

“You couldn’t handle her, all that red hair. Looks feisty, she’d have your balls.”

Guffaws. “I’ll get her number and let you know how it goes.”

 _Will you,_ she thinks. She doesn’t need these yokels, she knows her work. Scully bites down hard on her irritation as her eyes search the dead man’s for petichiae. The corneas are clouded and she probes the socket with a fingertip.

Mulder, having eyes and ears only for her at the moment, seems to have missed the horsetrading. Just as well, he’s still touchy about Padgett’s rank assertions. Perversely, the knowledge centers her. “The leather with this one too?” Mulder asks. “He’s so much bigger.”

“Hard to say.” She rocks back on her heels. Cut throats give her a crawly, ticklish feeling. As a kid she needed the blanket up to her chin at bedtime, and she now swallows hard against the urge to duck down into her collar. But not in front of these men, not ever. She pokes at the embedded cord halfheartedly. The cold, the mottled skin of the morbidly obese man makes her task a challenge. The locals knew the dead man as Plaid Pete because of the flannels he always wore. Rolled into town every now and again, picked up odd jobs. Drank some, fought some, never bothered anyone much.

Until the other day, evidently.

Mulder crouches down beside her as the wind changes. She hears his breathing now, smells his hair gel and his good aftershave. “Heinzelmann,” Mulder says, tracing the hilt of the right hand spear with a fingertip. “Also known as a Luring. In German folklore, it-”

“No,” she replies. “Not here.”

He regards her with mild surprise. “You care what they think?” Juts his chin towards the boys in blue.

“I care how what they think will affect the investigation.” He doesn’t understand his male privilege, her burning desire to be taken seriously in the company of men. He doesn’t understand what it is like to have breasts in a world that fits Kevlar by shoulder width.

Mulder all but sneers. “Scully, this is not a posse cut out for a serial killer investigation. They run the drunk tank and hand out parking tickets and write citations to people who pee in alleys. They’re the kind of guys who ask rape victims if they were provocatively dressed. Hell with them.”

Maybe he’d overheard after all. She knows he’s oversimplifying things, reducing them to stereotypes for the sake of convenience, but she is okay with that. “I’m cold,” she says. “I just want to get inside.”

Mulder’s brow furrows; she knows he has been concerned about her since the katabatic winds in Antarctica, since the cancer stripped her down. “Wrapped to go, then?”

She glances up at the officers again. They’re overgrown boys, most of them. Young, younger than she remembers being and most of them so handsome. She knows what the small town girls see in them. Strong jaws, big hands, good pensions. Scully judges the girls for this, though it’s been two years and Ed Jerse remains the last man whose hands were tight against her sweat-slicked body. She closes her eyes for a beat, thinks of how he gripped the opisthotonic arc of her back as she drowned in him and died a little death.

Thinks of Padgett’s book and wondered if she would have allowed him to-

Mulder coughs, stage right.

Scully turns to him, considering, and knows he would turn down the cosmetology students and local Harvest Queens. Porn habit aside, Mulder is discriminating in his own way. “I’m done here,” she says, rising. She removes her gloves and tosses them on the body, into which her thermometer is still spiked.

She waves one of the cops over, the pissed off one who called her Clarice. She doesn’t ask him, she tells him, to have the body sent to her lab. Opens her wallet and hands him $50 for gas. She’ll get reimbursed later but he doesn’t need to know that. She enjoys the sting of humiliation in his high school quarterback face.

She cares more than she admits, maybe more than even Mulder – even Padgett – could see.

The officer, unsure, folds the bills neatly in his hand. “It’s an honor to help the FBI, ma’am.”

Scully, in perfect agreement with this statement, gives him a crisp nod.

Mulder walks past her, a couple of orange leaves on his dark coat. He sits in the passenger’s side of their car and waits.

***

She drove to her apartment with Mulder still riding shotgun, deciding to wait until morning for her appointment with the impaled man. It is night now, though still early, and the stars are bright and hard in the late October sky.

Scully shivers at the thought of getting out. She scrubs her face with her hands to wake up. “You headed home, Mulder?”

He yawns. “Might get a burger, but yes.”

Scully stares up at her dark windows. “I could eat.”

“Oh, are you off your no red meat thing? I knew it would never last, you like ribs too much.”

Scully looks at him archly. “Chicken sandwich.”

Mulder groans. “You need iron, Scully. You drink all that tea, it causes malabsorption. If I prick you, you will not bleed.”

“I put raisins in my oatmeal. I eat spinach. Kale.”

“Not liver?” he asks, and she knows what he wants her to say.

“Tooms ruined it for me.”

Mulder looks a trifle smug. “Let’s go grab some food and we can talk about Heinzelmann.”

She pulls back out onto the street, thinking of the boy in the red coat. She wonders where he sleeps.

***

They’re in a booth at the Georgetown Café, Scully with grilled chicken on a Kaiser roll and Mulder with an elaborate hamburger involving guacamole and onion rings. They pushed aside the plastic vase of plastic flowers and had the waitress replace it with a pot of coffee.

Mulder squishes his sandwich with the palm of his hand. Scully watches the pinky-clear juices run out and leave high tide marks on his fries. The smell makes her stomach rumble.

“Heinzelmann,” Mulder says, “is a creature of German folklore who performs useful tasks for a household in exchange for tributes and tokens. But if he is ever chased out, evil will befall the residents.”

“A kobold,” Scully says, remembering the term from her German class. She takes a bite of her sandwich.

“The stories have become intertwined over time,” Mulder says. “Heinzelmann is said to take the form of a small boy in red velvet. But when he wants to frighten people, he appears as the same boy, though nude save for a leather thong around his neck and two spears or swords piercing his chest.” He gestures with his hands. “One of iron from shoulder to the bottom of the opposite ribcage, the other of bronze from side to side below his armpits. Sound familiar?”

“All three victims,” she acknowledges, as Mulder eats. “But why the swords and the leather strip? Why a child?”

“Mmmm… the Heinzelmann story is thought to originally be from the pagan Iron Age tribes in the Black Forest. They engaged in child sacrifice to create tribal gods. The word Heinzel is a pet form of Heinrich.”

“Home ruler,” says Scully.

“Precisely. So anyway, these tribes, they’d take a baby - flawless of course and the mother was probably some kind of fifteen year old vestal virgin impregnated in a tribal ceremony for the express purpose of carrying this doomed child and they’d –“ he pauses and looks at her.

“It’s fine,” she says, a little sharply. Softens it with, “Go on.”

Mulder nods. “They’d take this baby and leave him in his own darkened hut, interacting with him only to feed him and take care of basic hygiene. No one would speak to him or hold him or do anything other than ensure he survived. No taint of the world, that’s the important part. And then, on Midwinter’s Night when he was four or five, they’d lead him out with the leather strap around his neck. Garrote him, then, before he passed out, spear him with two long swords or spears the way we’ve seen.”

Scully is aware of a sick feeling low in her belly that has nothing to do with her disappointing sandwich. “And?” she breathes.

Mulder looks sad. “And they’d preserve the body with woodsmoke, make a mummy of it, and worship it. The sacrificed boy became the god of the tribe, it would protect them as long as they protected and honored the remains. They would sacrifice things to it. Lambs, birds, parts of the harvest, other children…” he trails off.

She swallows against the tight thing in her throat. “And the kobold?”

“As the tribes became assimilated, the idea of these mummy boys became entangled with the folklore of the settled Christians in the area. Heinzelmann, the kobold, the tribal god, they were all figures who demanded sacrifice for protection.”

“My German teacher indicated kobolds wanted dishes of milk, slices of cake, that sort of thing. Children weren’t being sacrificed.”

Mulder shrugs. “Think about the original endings to most fairy tales, Scully. Dancing in red-hot iron shoes, eyes gouged out with pokers. We sanitize these stories for children, but that wasn’t always the case. I bet you that for hundreds of years, little children around the Black Forest were told that if they weren’t good, their nurses would give them to the kobold. To Heinzelmann.”

Scully shakes off the creepy feeling left by Mulder’s story. “So why do we have three dead adults? If someone is drawing from these stories, shouldn’t there be dead little boys?” She tries to say this as though the dearth of brutally slain children is nothing but a flaw in his theory instead of a relief.

“Still working that out,” he says. “But there’s the boy…”

“The boy in the red coat.

“The boy in the red coat. He’s been seen around all three crime scenes. Georgia, Florida, and now Delaware.”

“And no one knows him,” Scully sighs. “Isn’t it likely that he’s traveling with the killer? I mean, wouldn’t that be part of the, you know, the fantasy he’s acting out?”

“Could be,” Mulder says. “But there were no footprints found around any of the scenes. None but the victim’s, anyway. No tire tracks.”

She remembers climbing trees with her brothers, scrambling up the rough trunks to pelt Melissa with acorns and English walnuts. “All three men were found in wooded areas, Mulder. A five year old kid could go over rocks and leaves and roots pretty easily without leaving prints. It doesn’t mean he’s the vengeful spirit of an Iron Age murder victim.”

“Indian Guide says maybe,” Mulder concedes. “Still though, three modern-day nomads in the woods, pierced by spears and garroted. We need to find that kid.”

“Indeed.”

They eat for a while, thinking. Scully steals some of his fries and dices them into her spinach salad.

“Those cops today,” Mulder says. “They got to you.”

Scully shrugs. “They were useless and it bothered me.”

He doesn’t say anything. Just looks at her.

She knows it’s an old psychologist’s trick, an interrogation technique. Stay quiet long enough and the subject will start talking to ease the tension. She gives in anyway. “Look, Mulder. You don’t get it. Men, even educated men, so often there’s just this…” she shakes her head. “You underestimated Karen Berquist. You didn’t think she could manipulate you, but she did and she did it very well. Those men, they saw me out there and they just…it would be one thing if they thought I was bad at my job, but they just never even considered it. I am a woman and I stole their case because of Title IX or some crap.”

Mulder sips at his beer. “Their dismissal of you was sexualized. In Padgett’s book, he wrote-“

“ _Fuck_ Padgett,” she snaps, surprising both of them. “He didn’t know anything about me, about you. And you got in the passenger’s side like a…like a whipped dog. I had to adjust the seat, they knew it was an act.”

Mulder shakes his head. “They didn’t. It’s why we have these cases. They can’t see what we can.”

Scully finishes her sandwich. “I need to go home,” she tells him. “Take the car. I’ll walk, I need the air.”

“You’ll be cold,” he says. “Stay, please. I think we should talk.”

Scully pulls on her gloves and stands. “I’m always cold,” she says. She leaves the keys and ten dollars on the table.

***

The night bites at her, but she walks fast and fierce towards her apartment, the sharp click of heels a clave for her thoughts to dance to.

_they murdered little boys into gods they raised them like lambs like Emily like Samantha is love always a sacrifice I love him I love him not this isn’t love Dana it’s quantum entanglement two particles dancing across a galaxy like Naciamento and Padgett together they wanted your heart and your body who wants your mind Dana those country cops would have raped you in a different scenario they wanted to call you a cunt a bitch Karen Berquist that bitch loving bitch with her goddamned canids and her lupus and her lies to Fox who names their son Fox it’s ridiculous I will never have a son whose son is the boy in the red coat_

A neon sign on the corner catches her eye. BAR it says, unpretentiously. BA when the R flickers.

Scully pauses and peers into the window. It will be warm if nothing else, and she can warm herself from the inside too. She could bum a cigarette. The bartender is a solidly built dishwater blonde with spectacular breasts that nearly spill from her cheap Lycra bustier. Scully longs for wine, or for one of the sugary frou-frou things she’d sneak when her mother had girlfriends over for canasta. But this is not that kind of bar. Gin and tonic, lime twist. Maybe a beer.

There are men at the bar, nine or ten of them, and a couple of women. No suits. No redheads. She will attract attention.

She does not want attention.

Scully resumes her walk home, thinking about the dead man.

Loneliness is a choice.

***

She beats the sunrise to the day and, muzzy with sleep, puts on her running clothes. She stretches her legs, _her muscular calves, Jesus_ , against the wall. Limbers her core with twenty-five pushups and one hundred crunches. She has a 5k route mapped out. Scully likes attaching numbers to things.

She sees the Big Dipper when she leaves her building. She starts out at a light jog, building up speed as she moves past street lamps and benches, heaps of crisp leaves. There are sleepy dogwalkers trudging past, little bags of poop dangling from their hands while the dogs snuffle and circle and decide. Scully does not miss having a dog.

Mulder’s ideas usually have something in them, she allows, as she passes the Metro station. It does appear that this Heinzelmann legend is involved somehow. Someone tortured as a child, maybe, acting out a revenge fantasy. He’d be strong and fit, of German heritage, and have some kind of van to transport the spears and the victims in.

Mulder already knows this, why is she bothering?

Scully turns her attention back to the body as she rounds the corner by the news stand, thinks back to the man’s hands. Something is nagging at her there, something was –

She staggers back, gasping as hot liquid spills down her chest, at the shock of her sudden stop.

“Jesus, I’m sorry!” A man in a dark coat is staring at her, appalled, a crumpled Starbucks cup in his hand. “I didn’t see you around the corner.”

Scully realizes it’s his latte down her front. “My fault,” she says, panting. “I took the corner a little tight.”

“I’m so sorry,” he says again, and reaches to dab at her shirt with his handful of napkins before thinking better of it. “'Did I burn you?”

“I’m fine.” Now that the shock’s worn off, she sizes up her companion in the ambient glow of a streetlamp. He’s over six feet tall, light hair and dark eyes. Clean shaven, handsome in a ski instructor sort of way, dark suit under a dark knee-length coat. She estimates him to be her own age or slightly younger. Lawyer, maybe. The tailoring says a good K Street firm. The hour says he wants to make partner by 40.

The man looks at his ruined cup, at Scully’s steaming shirt. “Listen, I’m going to go get a refill. Why don’t you come with me, let me buy you some coffee and you can, uh, dry off I guess. I’m really sorry.”

Scully smiles in her polite and detached way. “I appreciate that, thank you, but I don’t live far from here.”

He sighs. “Come on, I have an Italian Catholic mother. The latent guilt will eat me alive.”

She feels a kinship to this sentiment. Goodness, it’s a cup of coffee, not a paid sex act. And the wet shirt is freezing. She tries not to think of Ted Bundy, how suave and manipulative he was. “You know what, sure. I could use some caffeine.”

The man grins, then heads back around the corner to the Starbucks down the block. Scully follows him with her arms crossed over her chest. He holds the door open as she walks up, releasing warm air scented with coffee and cinnamon.

“Didn’t want to hold you up on the sidewalk,” he says, taking a spot in line, “but my name’s Raphael.” He throws his squashed cup away to extend a hand.

She gives it a firm shake. “Dana.”

The girl at the counter takes their order, which Scully is content to let him pay for. She’s not going to make herself ridiculous with protests. In the light his eyes are deep gray, his hair the color of ripe wheat shot through with both lowlights and strands of white blonde. If his mother is Italian, his father must be a Viking.

“So you live in Georgetown,” Raphael says, once the drinks arrive. They make their way to a small table by the window.

“I take it you live here too,” she says, waiting for the coffee to cool.

“For now. I’m doing some work with a local firm, they’re putting me up in an apartment for five months. I’ve been here for two, and I like it a lot.”

Scully is drowsy in the heat now that her endorphins are wearing off. She is disinclined to talk, but too polite for silence. “What kind of firm?”

“Accounting.” He makes ironic jazz hands beside his face. “What about you, what gets you up so early?”

“Uncle Sam.” Sometimes she feels shy about telling people she is an FBI agent. Sometimes it feels like a story she made up to sound exciting, knobby-kneed Dana Scully with her pretty sister and her popular brothers and her stacks and stacks of secondhand books.

“CIA? NSA?” He takes a long swallow of coffee. “FBI? AT&T?”

“I need to see your security clearance before I divulge that information.”

“I’ve been in this town just long enough to believe you,” Raphael says, checking his watch. “Hey, I’ve got to catch the MARC to Baltimore, or I’d stay and talk. I know I’ve already said it, but I’m really sorry for dumping coffee on you. Compulsive apologizing, it’s part of my heritage.”

Scully smiles. “Irish Catholic, I understand.”

He grins back. “Dana O’…?”

“Scully. No relation to Vin.” They almost put that under her yearbook picture.

“Ha, I guess you hear that a lot. If you’re willing to give a guy another chance, here’s my card.” He sets it on the table, looking sheepish. ”I’d like to talk to you again, Dana No Relation.”

“I might just do that,” she lies. “Thanks for the coffee.”

He gets up and goes to the door, waving at her as he walks out. Scully takes the card then. It is a heavy cardstock and identifies him as Raphael Thaler, an economist with some firm she’s never heard of out of New York. All right, so not a K Street lawyer, but she wasn’t so far off.

He’s handsome in a completely uninteresting way, not like -

_He’s handsome, okay? He’s perfect, he would have been out of your league not too long ago, don’t be such an idiot._

Scully flicks the card against her thumbnail, thinking.

Nails, what was it about his nails, bloated and dead and impaled, why had she noticed…

They were clean.

Homeless men, drifters, transients: they do not have clean hands. Clean hands mean they are washed somewhere. Clean hands imply other, more basic needs are being met.

She needs to know where he washed his hands.

Scully downs her coffee in a few scalding draughts, jams the card in her pocket, dashes outside. The air hits her still-damp shirt and the chill spreads across her flesh, a sensory negative of Naciamento’s hands as they covered her breasts in her own hot blood.

***

Mulder comes in around mid-afternoon, humming the bridge from _White Wedding_ as she’s breadloafing the liver. “Puncture in the distal portion of the right lobe due to probe,” she says into the microphone. “Tissue appears cirrhotic.”

“What’s cooking?”

Scully drops a chunk of the meaty tissue into a specimen jar. “Funny you should ask that. His stomach contents were rather interesting.” She selects a plastic container from the stainless steel counter, brandishing it at her squeamish partner. His nose wrinkles obligingly.

“Make it good, Scully. Let us remember that I lack your comfort with the internal organs of strangers.”

“This appears to be fried chicken, mashed potatoes with the skin left on, and fresh broccoli.” She returns the container to the counter. “For a transient, that’s a bit strange.”

Mulder regards Plaid Pete, who lies in ghastly repose with his organs peeled out from tongue to rectum. Scully’s bloody pruning shears rest at his feet. “No Vienna sausages? No Tastykakes? What kind of self-respecting vagrant is this character?”

“I checked with local restaurants. None of them served a meal like that to him in the past week.” Scully begins stuffing wadded up newspaper into the cavity of Pete’s torso. “He lives somewhere, Mulder. He cooks, he washes his hands. His clothes were relatively clean and he was in overall good shape. I get the impression that he roams the region a bit, but there’s somewhere stable that he lives, and lives reasonably well. Pete’s not hanging out under bridges.”

Mulder drums his fingers on the autopsy table. “Is his name actually Pete? Do we have an ID?”

Scully hands him a printout with only a smudge of blood on the corner. “Francis Peter Morran, age 37. Did some time for grand theft auto, lots of drug and petty theft charges. A few bar brawls that got dropped. Smacked around a few girlfriends. Some second and third degree sexual assaults.”

“The standard variety pack,” Mulder says, looking bored.

Scully snips at a portion of the pancreas. “I’m thinking searching his house will give us some idea on motive. The other two were clearly homeless and in much larger metropolitan areas. We may have gotten lucky with Pete here.”

“Our definitions of ‘getting lucky’ have become downright depressing, Scully.”

“Still better off than Pete,” she replies, wiping sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. The gesture pulls a large section of hair loose from the blue surgical cap she’s wearing, and it obscures her vision. She begins to deglove when Mulder tucks the hair behind her ear.

“Do you want it back under the lunchlady thing?” he asks.

She is mortified by the goosebumps his fingers have raised on her arms, on the back of her neck, at the cauda equina where her flesh is branded. “No,” she whispers, then clears her throat. “No, thanks.”

His hand lingers a second longer, then amuses itself with the smooth weight of a skull key. Mulder, jock that he is, tosses it up in the air and catches it while he talks. “I’m thinking we’ll head back up to Delaware in a few hours, maybe. Poke around, see where old Pete was frying hisself some chicken.”

“No water or electricity in his name. He’s not listed in any tenant agreements that I could find, but you know how that goes. Sublessees and so forth.”

Mulder makes an admiring sound, catches the skull key around his back. “You’ve been a busy lady.”

“It’s an intriguing case, Mulder, I must admit. And I’m eager to find the boy and get him somewhere safe.” Does that make it sound like _she_ wants him? She thinks it might. “I mean, someone must be missing him, family or friends. He should probably be enrolled in kindergarten. We can check kids missing from rosters in Georgia, where he first appeared.”

“I don’t think this boy has been missed by anyone for a long time, Scully.” He places the skull key next to the slices of brain. It looks alien and strange next to the organic mushroomy frills of the cerebellum, which always reminds her of a scrotum.

Scully begins scooping the segments of Pete’s organs into a plastic bag to pack inside his abdomen along with the newspaper. “Because he’s a malevolent German spirit?” she asks, her voice rich with scorn. “Come back from the Black Forest to wreak havoc for unknown reasons upon the white trash of the Eastern seaboard?”

Mulder bats his lashes, lets out a girlish and dreamy sigh. “Oh, _Scully_ ,” he breathes. “No one understands me like you do.”

***

It’s late evening by the time they make it back to Felton, Delaware. The car smells of the turkey sandwiches they ate on the road, of coffee and toiletries and the weight of a seven year itch. Scully flips open the visor mirror and checks her eye makeup to make sure her mascara hasn’t flaked.

“Women used to put belladonna drops in their eyes to widen the pupil,” Mulder says. “It’s meant to simulate sexual arousal.”

“Or an impending stroke,” she replies, snapping the mirror closed.

“The two are not mutually exclusive. There are far worse ways to go,” says the man fated to die by autoerotic asphyxiation.

“True, but not very dignified.” She thinks about dying of cancer, of her body cannibalizing itself. She thinks of Emily, dissolving from the inside, of her murdered sister who probably died in pain and panic. Ed Jerse’s hands at her throat, the leucotome headed for her lacrimal bones, garrotes, impalements, disemboweling….

A man presenting you with your own beating heart.

“What would you pick, Mulder, if you could? Other than old age,” she stipulates, knowing him.

He smirks. “You’re no fun, Scully.”

“I’ve heard as much.”

His brow furrows. “I would like to be shot at 104 by the jealous husband of a beautiful woman.”

Scully shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“What? Is that not a grownup answer? Okay, I want to die in a canopied four-poster bed surrounded by friends and loved ones and my faithful hunting dogs Bob and Lester. I want a long, lingering illness so that everyone has time to prepare for their grief while I waste away, asking nothing but peace on earth for those I leave behind. Norman Rockwell Goes To A Deathbed.”

She is surprised by the bitterness in him. The way his father died, his sister’s disappearance - shouldn’t he understand the importance of a long goodbye? Then it hits her. “Is that what it was like while I was…”

“Dying? Yes.” His knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

“It was hard for me too,” she says. “Dying.”

“Well, how about we both just avoid doing it again, then.” His grip relaxes, one hand dropping to his thigh. “You’re over your quota this year.”

“Why 104?”

“Huh? Oh, I once saw an article about this guy who was the oldest man in his town or something, he was 103. And he said living until 104 would be okay, but that 105 was such a trite number he wanted to cash in before that.” He chuckles at the memory. “Had the whole George Burns thing down, you know. Stogies and scotch.”

Scully smiles at the thought of Mulder at 104, cranky and paranoid with a cigar hanging from his mouth. “If no one else steps up,” she promises, “I’ll shoot you again.”

“You’re a good friend, Scully.”

Gravel crunches beneath the car as they turn into an unpaved driveway. The El-Car motel has twenty-five rooms, and one of them is available. The El-Car rarely serves people who do not wish to enjoy the company of one bed, so Scully signs for the QN SIZE CLR TV NOSMKG before being issued an unpleasantly sticky key.

There is no tension in sharing a room, they are old pros at this. Scully rolls the spare blanket into a log to fill in the tired mattress. She turns the hair dryer on the linens to kill things that thrive at body temperature. Mulder emerges from the bathroom, toothpaste foaming at his mouth like a rabid dog in a cartoon. “Earwigs in the shower,” he warns. “They look vengeful.”

“Splendid. Left side or right, I always forget.”

“You like the passenger’s side,” he says. “Did you know most women do? I mean, in terms of beds.”

Scully, wearing gray flannel pajamas, gingerly lowers herself to the bed. “Is it reversed in England?”

Mulder cocks his head. “I don’t know.” He returns to the bathroom and finishes his toilet before joining her. The springs creak, which makes her think of the many prostitutes that have been here. She prays the walls are thick, sparing her the sound of $50 trysts.

She does not think Mulder has ever employed a prostitute, but cannot definitively rule it out. This unsettles her, and she closes her eyes against the idea.

“What about you, Scully?” His voice is muffled because they are facing away from each other. Making the beast with two fronts, as it were.

“How do I want to die? Other than not at all?” Though that’s not as true as it used to be, not since Fellig.

“It was your question.”

Scully’s brain runs through the thousands of deaths she has seen, a Victorian album of mementos mori. “Carbon monoxide leak while I’m sleeping.”

“That’s a pretty good one, I guess.”

She feels him settle under the blankets, work his head into the pillow. “Good night, Mulder. Don’t let the earwigs pinch.”

“Good night, Scully. Don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite.”

She sense, after a time, that Mulder is asleep. She turns to her left side, mindful not to stir him in this rare state, and regards him in the streetlight that filters through the cheap curtains. Ever practical, he is sleeping in his t-shirt and boxers. His back is a swimmer’s back and it rises and falls with the tide of her own lungs. With a practiced eye, she admires the spare elegance of his physique. There is a Spartan grace about him that appeals to her, that serves as an unshakable scaffold for his wilder imaginings.

It has been years since she ever doubted that she loved him, her mother knows that. But in love…that’s something else. What does it mean? Scully, nearly orthodox in her empiricism, is hard pressed to define the idea.

She considers her prior relationships, the component pieces of them against what she imagines being in love is like. Affection, surely. Life without him has been tried and found wanting. Respect, of course. She thinks of Daniel - the near reverence she had, was that love? Likely not. She trusts Mulder with her life, but why shouldn’t she? He held her dying daughter, he dug her from a frozen tomb, he withstood her brother to sit at her deathbed. There is attraction, but that too must be evaluated. Mulder is good looking by anyone’s standards, and she’s well into her sexual prime. Is it passion or proximity that makes her breath catch now and again when he touches her, that holds her eye when he rolls his shirtsleeves up his forearms and loosens his tie?

Scully thinks of the last time she slept with Mulder, the two of them tucked in like this in Kroner. She remembers all the platitudes she’d thrown at that idiot Sheila, some flowery Hallmark thing about friendship and love. Sad, stupid Sheila who, under that fluffy topknot, had ideas that she and Mulder could ever possibly understand one another. Had it actually meant anything, her little friends-and-lovers speech? Had it come from anywhere inside her other than a burning desire to get the hell out of flyover country and back to the civilized coast?

Outside, a woman’s voice, shrill. A man’s voice shouts something back, then a motorcycle revs. Scully tenses, thinking of Kitty Genovese, but there is no further sound. This is who she is now, murder always on her mind.

Is she in love with Mulder, or in love with the idea of someone understanding that? Someone who will not judge her scars and empty places. Who gave her some of them.

Sometimes, when the night is long like this and she gives herself to her darker fancies, Scully imagines that she willed her brain tumor into existence by longing for a child. Some metastatic force in her answered that base need and multiplied by dividing itself, trying to fill a void with flesh.

She is afraid that her penance for the snobbish disappointment with Emily’s dull animal eyes means that she will never, ever have a child of her own. One that grows in her body and rounds her flat belly with life, a baby that comes screaming into the world to lie bloody and gorgeous upon her chest. She wants to cup its peachy head against her palm, to have her breasts aching with milk. She has considered asking Mulder for assistance on this front, but not yet. She needs context first.

Margaret Scully still has the crib last used by Charlie as a baby. She’d offered it to Bill for Matthew, but the cost of having it shipped exceeded buying a new one, and so it was left to languish in storage. Melissa is dead and Charlie considers children to be a particularly virulent form of sexually transmitted disease.

Scully knows her mother is disappointed. Melissa was the wild one and she, Dana, was meant to do all of things that daughters do.

Next to her, Mulder turns onto his back, his arm draped across the blanket roll between them. He mumbles something vague, his lower lip pouting even in his sleep.

This is not what she wanted for herself, sharing an awful bed in an awful motel in an awful town with this man who has no tidy role in her life. She’d almost respect herself more if she stripped her pajamas off and woke him, just to see what he’d do. Taking action instead of waiting like a fairy tale princess for some damned thing to happen. That hallway after Dallas, what if they had just…if she had leaned up a second sooner…

But she can’t, of course she can’t, she is severe and unreachable and polished and pale. She has crafted this image of herself since her diagnosis, cashing in on the nameless mystique of the terminally ill. God in his mercy lent her grace, the Lady of Shalott.

An owl calls across the night and Scully remembers that there are predators for her to hunt. She turns back to her right side and lets sleep pull her down.


	2. Chapter 2

“No ma’am, I can’t say that I do,” says the officer who claimed he would get her phone number. His name is Royles and he has an obnoxious dimple in his chin. “If Pete had a house in these parts, this would be the first I heard of it. We’d see him sleeping in his old truck, a big camo Chevy Suburban, in parking lots sometimes, out behind the Food Lion or the strip mall. Sometimes he’d spend a few nights at the El-Car, or in the drunk tank. Disappear for a few weeks, then roll back in to drink and fight and make a few bucks under the table. In fact, when we tracked his car down it was behinds the Lotta Suds Laundry. He’d been fixing their machines.”  
  
“We were back at the crime scene this morning,” Scully says. “There weren’t any tire tracks. My guess is that whoever killed him somehow lured him out from wherever he was staying at the time.”  
  
The officer shrugs expansively. “Could be, I don’t know.”  
  
“Where’s his car now?” Mulder asks.  
  
Royles gestures behind them, to the back of the building. “Impound lot. No prints, no trace. We checked.” He tosses Mulder the keys, as if daring him to contradict these findings.  
  
Scully feels Royles’s eyes on her. She is not bothered so much by his gaze as she is by the fact that he makes no attempt to conceal it. “Anything else before we go, _Officer_ Royles?”  
  
He meets her eyes. “No ma’am, can’t say that there is.”  
  
Mulder jangles the keyring. “We’ll return these when we’re finished.” He rests three fingers at Scully’s elbow and guides her to the door. “Asshole,” he mutters as they go outside.  
  
“Whatever,” she says, scanning the lot for the truck.  
  
“It seems fitting that we can’t find a camo truck,” Mulder observes, kicking the tires of an old Mustang. It groans, sheds a dandruff of rust.  
  
Scully spots it at the back, waves Mulder over. “Camo my foot,” she sniffs. “That looks like someone got high and happened to have brown and green spray paint on hand.”  
  
“The man was not an artiste, to be sure,” Mulder says, peering in the window. “Though he kept a tidy car.”  
  
It’s true. The floor of the car has no fast food wrappers, soda bottles, cigarette butts, underwear, socks, condoms, or other detritus often found in semi-inhabited automobiles. There is a plastic hula girl on the dashboard, and a pair of aviator sunglasses clipped to the visor.  
  
Mulder unlocks the doors, releasing cigarette ghosts and Old Spice. He climbs into the front seat and puts on the dead man’s sunglasses. “Yee-haw.” The glove compartment contains half a bag of miniature Hershey bars.  
  
Scully goes into the back, and finds she must agree with Royles. The truck is spotless, other than smudges of fingerprint powder. On the floor between the second and third rows of seats she finds a green Coleman sleeping bag. “Guess this is for his Food Lion campouts,” she says. “Might as well take a look.”  
  
They unroll the sleeping bag on the asphalt. Scully, on her hands and knees, slowly runs her hands along the worn nylon shell. “Nothing,” she says, though she’s not sure what she even expected to find. Unzipping the sleeping bag reveals a similar paucity of evidence. There are a few dark hairs clinging to the flannel lining. She puts them in a paper envelope, feeling disappointed.  
  
“Damn their efficient hides,” Mulder says, twirling the keychain. “Okay, so. There are three keys on this ring. One to the car, one presumably to the house, and the third…”  
  
“Vacation home?” She gets up, scowling at the runs in her stockings. Her new shoes will need to be buffed and polished after this.  
  
“I’m thinking somewhere in the Hamptons, yes.”  
  
Scully cups her hands for the keys, which Mulder tosses her. The keychain is emblazoned with a picture of a lasciviously grinning crab. “I Got My Crabs From Dirty Dick’s,” she reads, then turns it over. “Dirty Dick’s Crab House, North Myrtle Beach. Charming.”  
  
“Jews have proscriptions against the consumption of seagoing pubic lice,” Mulder remarks. “Yahweh does not want them eaten.”  
  
“Then He shouldn’t have made them taste so delicious with Old Bay,” Scully retorts. “Listen, we don’t know this area, Mulder. It’s a needle in a haystack trying to find this house. How do you want to play this?”  
  
He sighs. ”I’m not sure. I’m tempted to let them ferret it out, then we can come back, pat them on the head, and take a look-see when they do. My concern is one of those idiots screwing up the scene to prove how big his dick is.”  
  
Scully dangles the keychain with come-hither eyes. “Maybe we forget to return the keys.”  
  
A slow grin spreads over his face. “Maybe we do.”  
  
***  
  
“I feel awful,” Mulder says, tossing pencils at the ceiling. “Agent Scully and I, we…..yes. Absolutely we will.” He gives her a thumbs-up, listening to the receiver for a moment. “You bet. As soon as you find something, you give us a call and we will drive back up with the keys to join your men.”  
  
Gleeful, he props his feet on his desk, listens some more.  
  
“Right, yeah. I’m thinking wooded area if he went to the trouble of painting that Chevy. It’ll be off the grid, so either solar panels or a chimney. Well or a stream for water. Yeah, I….uh huh. Uh huh, I see. Okay, well, thanks for your understanding, Chief. We just want the lock intact, so we’ll be up fast as you need us. About a two hour drive, no more. Yessir, you too.”  
  
Mulder hangs up the phone, looking so smug that Scully can practically see the canary feathers hanging from his mouth.  
  
“Oh, bravo Mr. Olivier,” she says. “Think they’ll turn anything up?  
  
“They have a better shot than we do, to be honest. The scene backs up to a few hundred acres of wooded area. I gave them some pointers, but we are not local fauna, Scully. Thankfully. I say we give it three days before we call in a task force.” Mulder hates task forces. They require a level of fraternization that makes him more pedantic and asocial than usual.  
  
She pours coffee from their bottomless pot. Yesterday morning she was sitting at Starbucks with whatshisname. Raphael. She’d taken a different run this morning, just in case, though she also put his number in her phone. Her line of work, you never know who might come in handy. “I’ve got a lunch appointment with Smialek from the Maryland ME’s office about that woman from Cunningham Falls. You want in?”  
  
“I’ll pass. I want to look into a few things for a profile on our would-be Heinzelmann. I’m meeting with a folklorist at the embassy.”  
  
“That’s a thing? Embassy folklorist?”  
  
“Ja, iss gut.” He winces when a pencil hits him in the head.  
  
“Right, well, I want to go look at those hairs from the sleeping bag.”  
  
“Have fun. I’ll be talking ghosties and ghoulies with a fraulein.”  
  
Scully grabs the envelope of hair from his desk. “Don’t make any sausage jokes,” she advises before leaving the office. She hears Mulder chuckling as the door closes.  
  
***^^  
  
The lab is bright with fluorescent bulbs bouncing off of stainless steel and white Formica.  
  
“Agent Scully,” says a lab tech she’d taught years ago. “It’s good to see you.”  
  
She smiles, searching her memory for a name. “You too,” she says. “I don’t get over here as much as I’d like.” Dara, Darla, Delia. Delia Ostrow, that was it. “Will I be in anyone’s way over there, Delia?” She nods at a nearby lab bench.  
  
The woman shakes her head. “Not at all. Dr. Roloson and I are running some PCRs, just let us know if you need anything.”  
  
Rachel Roloson, another one of her girls, waves amiably from beside a centrifuge. “Agent Scully.”  
  
Delia joins her, and the two of them are lost in their work by the time Scully settles down at her microscope. She makes a wet mount of one of the hairs, then flips the tape recorder on.  
  
“Hair is dark, root indicates it fell out naturally rather than being pulled. Shaft has a large diameter and is round, with smooth cuticle edges. Distal end appears to have been cut with scissors. Medulla is present, and is surrounded by large pigment granules.” She pauses the tape here, makes a casting of the hair with clear nail polish before resuming her dictation. “Hair appears human, with an imbricate crenate pattern. It likely belongs to a person of Asian descent.”  
  
Scully pauses to process what she just said. Pete does not appear to be of Asian descent. She calls to the two women at the nearby lab bench. “Rachel, Delia?”  
  
“Agent Scully?”  
  
“I need to run to the morgue for a sample. Can you just keep half an eye on this stuff for me?”  
  
“Sure thing,” Delia says. “We’ll be here a while.”  
  
Scully clips briskly to the morgue on her three inch heels and, instead of having an Igor pull up yesterday’s samples, she locates Pete in the fridge. She pulls about twenty hairs from all over his head and a half dozen from his groin, separating them into two plastic containers. The dead suffer many indignities at her hands.  
  
The vials go into her lab coat pocket as she rubs her arms, tucks her fingers into her armpits to warm them up. She needs to have her iron checked.  
  
Back through the labyrinthine hallways to the lab she was using. She pushes the swinging doors hard enough that one bangs into the wall, startling the other occupants of the room. “Sorry,” she says, ducking her head. Waggles her fingers in thanks at Delia and Rachel, who exchange a glance as she brushes past them to her scope.  
  
Shit, shit, she left the tape recorder running. She’s short on time if she’s going to make lunch with Smialek, and decides to pick up here. She can have Danny edit the fifteen minute gap out for her later. Pete’s hair on the glass next to the sleeping bag hair, and her suspicions are confirmed.  
  
“The unknown hairs do not appear to be from the victim,” she intones, sketching out her observations on a notepad. “All of the unknown hairs contain a solid medulla and large pigment granules, while the victim’s show absent or fragmented medullae and smaller pigment granules consistent with a Caucasian background. Hairs from both sources show an imbricate crenate pattern.”  
  
Scully finishes her observations of a dozen other hairs and asks an intern to clean up and send the roots off for analysis. She can still make her lunch appointment if traffic isn’t bad. She goes out the back door to avoid chit chat, half-running through the maze of corridors and stairways. She can navigate this building in her dreams. Out to the garage and into her car, she catches her breath before putting the key into the ignition. Smoothes her hair down, chugs yesterday’s cold coffee. “You’re good,” she tells herself. “You are on a roll.”  
  
The Taurus eases down the ramp and noses onto the Pennsylvania Avenue as she waits for a break in traffic. Scully puts her recording into the tape deck, wanting to listen to her autopsy notes and hair notes all at once.  
  
“Begin autopsy on 37 year old white male,” Scully hears herself say as she squeals between a Mercedes and a garbage truck. She hates the flat drone of her voice on tape, but she often gets so lost in what she’s doing that the words seem to leave her without her full awareness. Her autopsy notes continue for another forty three minutes, until she sees the Baltimore skyline. Such as it is, anyway.  
  
She listens to her first observations about the hair, and fast forwards to try and find the second part. She stops the tape, listening for her voice.  
  
“-would be,” comes a muffled voice. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”  
  
“Rachel,” answers Delia’s voice, “not everyone is as slutty as you.”  
  
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”  
  
Giggling, the sound of a centrifuge whirring.  
  
Scully stares at the cassette deck. You absolutely should not eavesdrop, she tells herself. Have Danny scrub it out, focus on the hair.  
  
Who is she kidding?  
  
She rewinds the tape. “…to a person of Asian descent.” She hears herself ask the women to watch her table, hears the sharp report of her heels on the linoleum.  
  
A moment of silence, then Rachel speaks. “She did NOT look like that when we had her. How red is her hair, Jesus.”  
  
Bitch.  
  
“Hey, good for her,” says Delia. “I can’t pull off red, I tried.”  
  
“I think the carpet matches the drapes and all, but she gets it done. Covering up gray, whatever. I would. How old is she, anyway?”  
  
Old enough to slap you, Scully thinks. And enough rank to get away with it.  
  
“I heard she went to med school when she was 19 or something. Early admissions and finished college in three years. She’s a certified genius, I think.”  
  
“I heard she was screwing her professors.”  
  
Scully feels her jaw drop. She wills herself to hit stop, but knows it won’t happen.  
  
“Agent Scully? No way,” Delia says. “No fucking way. She’s so…you know. Scully.”  
  
A thump, muttering she can’t pick up. Come on, come on, gossip louder you ungrateful little assholes. She puts on her blinker to get onto Lombard Street, half afraid she’ll make her appointment before the conversation ends.  
  
Then, “…Willis when she was at the Academy.”  
  
“Oh, shit, yeah I did hear that!” says Delia. “You go, Scully.”  
  
Scully is appalled, her cheeks flaming. This…this is what people think of her?  
  
“Well, good for her now, anyway,” Rachel says. Her voice is muffled now, and Scully remembers the woman was wearing a surgical mask when she returned from the morgue. “I mean, Fox Mulder, come on. Who wouldn’t?”  
  
Laughter, more mumbling. Scully prays for a red light.  
  
“Right? Do you think he’s actually crazy or what?”  
  
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not BSU, his crazy isn’t my problem. I swam laps the next lane over from him a few times and he can believe in whatever the hell he wants as long as he shows up and looks that pretty. I heard he’s a serious nympho though.”  
  
“I’ll take a number.”  
  
This is more than she can process. She forgets that she and Mulder don’t live in their own insulated bubble, that two people who lurk in basements and chase flying saucers might arouse a bit of interest. And she did what they said, she had…but it wasn’t like that.  
  
It wasn’t.  
  
Was it?  
  
Delia is speaking again. “So is the, uh, consorting verified, or what? You think they’re on his desk in their suits down there or something? A little alien probing, know what I mean? Those were some hot shoes. You don’t just start wearing those for nothing.”  
  
“I certainly would be,” comes Rachel’s voice. The tape has caught up with itself. “It’s fucking ridiculous if she isn’t.”  
  
“Rachel, not everyone is as slutty as you.”  
  
“I heard it’s eight inches, Deely.”  
  
Scully pulls up in front of Attman’s Deli and parks the car. She has no name for the emotions swirling through her, but she is certain of one thing.  
  
She’s calling Raphael Thaler after lunch.  
  
***  
  
The Baltimore Beltway, such a poor imitation of the real thing, is sluggish at this time, people heading out of work early for a few extra hours of weekend in Annapolis or Philly or, if they are feeling ambitious, Skyline Drive. There are cozy inns and hotels along the 95 corridor, tucked away places for lovers to eat blueberry pancakes among rooms full of reproduction antiques and crocheted doilies. She has visited some of them. There was a place in Easton with Jack Willis, set right up against the Chesapeake Bay. They went crabbing off a pier out back, and the lady of the house steamed their catch with sweet corn. Scully wishes she had let him talk her into skinny-dipping that night, my god it was August and so hot, what was she afraid of?  
  
It would be nice, she reflects, to spend an evening with a man who didn’t want her liver or her fingers or her hair or her heart. Who, perhaps, just want to split a bottle of the amusing house red and go to bed. Sexual objectification seems almost innocent to her at this point and it’s been too damned long.  
  
Clearly she hasn’t got a reputation to protect.  
  
Scully pulls out her phone, grateful for the foresight that compelled her to save his number, as the business card got destroyed in the wash. She brings up his information, hits send. The phone rings a few times and she’s about ready to chicken out when he answers. “Hello, Raphael? This, um, this is Dana Scully. We met on the –“  
  
“Hey, Dana No Relation! I didn’t expect you to call.”  
  
She is amused by his forthrightness. “That makes two of us I guess.”  
  
“Ha, so what can I do for you?”  
  
There’s a cheerful arrogance in his voice that appeals to her, makes her feel cocky and flirtatious. It’s Friday, and she’s only 35. “I find myself uncharacteristically free this evening. I was wondering whether you were, um, around. For dinner, maybe. Drinks.”  
  
“Oh, uncharacteristically? Rubbing in our social calendar, are we?”  
  
She laughs. “I mean, I’m not working. I’m usually working.”  
  
Heavy sigh from Raphael. “I have a team happy hour tonight, so –“  
  
She feels herself blush for no reason she can pinpoint. “I understand, it’s short notice. Maybe another time.”  
  
“Slow down there, No Relation. I was going to say ‘so I’d be particularly pleased by a better offer.’ Give a guy a chance to finish a sentence.”  
  
Grateful that he can’t see, Scully presses a hand to her eyes. Fuck, fuck, is she this out of practice? “Um,” she mumbles. “I’m not great at this.”  
  
“Let me try, then. Hey, is this Dana Scully? Dana, this is Raphael Thaler, we met a couple of days ago when I poured coffee all over you.”  
  
“It’s nice to hear from you.” She is somewhere between charmed and mortified, with no bets on the winner.  
  
“Listen, I realize that this is really short notice and I’m probably the last person you wanted to hear from, but do you happen to have any plans tonight? I know you have some kind of Very Important Government Job and usually work Friday nights, but, well, there’s this lame happy hour at work that I’d love to have an excuse to get out of.”  
  
“You know, it happens that I am free this evening,” she says, in a measured voice, changing lanes and speeding up to ten miles per hour.  
  
“Oh, that’s awesome! I’m really glad I took a chance and called you and that we had a conversation with pauses in it and exchanged vital information without leaping to conclusions.”  
  
“I’m hanging up,” she warns.  
  
“Okay, okay. I don’t know the area too well yet. I had lunch at some place last week, La Shama….lama…something.”  
  
“Chaumiere? On M Street?” Nice, romantic-ish, but not uncomfortably so. She considers this an acceptable offer, and there is a fireplace.  
  
“That’s the one. You finish your Big Important Job in time to meet me at 7?”  
  
“I can work something out.”  
  
“I’m looking forward to it,” he says, with a confessional air.  
  
“See you at 7,” Scully replies, and puts her phone away. She merges onto 295, homeward bound.  
  
***  
  
“What’s up, doc?” Mulder calls when she opens the door.  
  
“Helicopters,” she says, depositing her coat on a chair stacked with binders. “Satellites. Clouds.”  
  
“So literal, you science types. How’s the Cunningham Falls thing?”  
  
Empty eye sockets, the thick muscles of the thighs all slashed and carved, she doesn’t want to talk about it. “They’re getting her settled in downstairs.”  
  
Mulder knows the depth of the silence in her and does not plumb it. “The Germans,” he says, “are a dark people. I had read the original Grimms’ years ago, but she had some new ones for me.”  
  
Scully pours some coffee into an FBI mug, glances sidelong at her partner. She thinks of the women in the lab, 8 inches, Deely, and her memory of his nude body backs this up. This is ridiculous, she is ridiculous, standing here and looking at him like she’s a high school freshman stuck in the elevator with the captain of the football team. It’s only Mulder, she reprimands herself, this is just Padgett’s nonsense and too much time alone. Your life is not wholly contained in this room. She sets about organizing her latest stack of postmortem findings.  
  
“…reminiscent of Heinzelmann,” Mulder says, and she realizes she has not been listening at all.  
  
She covers it up by passing him the coffee she just poured. “Long day for both of us, it sounds like. Those hairs in the sleeping bag, Mulder, they belong to someone of Asian descent. I sent them off for further analysis, and hopefully his house will tell us whose they were.”  
  
“Hooker?”  
  
“Mmmm, could be but I don’t think so. It looked like it was from someone pretty young, or at least someone who took very good care of their hair. And it had been cut recently. Short, just a few inches.”  
  
“Not typical for a working girl. You sure it wasn’t pubic?”  
  
“It didn’t look like it, too straight. Also Asian, I think.”  
  
“Curiouser and curiouser. We’ll just hope they turn up his shanty and we can get it sorted out. I’m working on a profile tonight. We’ll get some lo mein to fuel the process.” He just assumes she’s coming, and not unfairly.  
  
“Ah,” Scully says, fiddling with paper clips, “I will actually have to turn down that invitation.”  
  
“We can get fajitas instead, if you want.  
  
“It’s not the cuisine, Mulder. I have, I’m going out. With someone.”  
  
Mulder looks up, confused. “Like a date?”  
  
She snorts. “I believe that is the intent, yes.”  
  
“Who’s the lucky fella?” he drawls, a white collar John Wayne.  
  
She shrugs, like she has dates all the time. “Some guy I met the other day. Seems nice.” She checks herself before she provides more information. It would be embarrassing to sound excited.  
  
“Getting any new ink?” Mulder asks, which is both mean and expected, but he’s looking at something under a jeweler’s loupe and she can’t give him the haughty expression he deserves.  
  
“Probably a dolphin on my ankle if I don’t go ahead and get my tongue pierced.” Think about that with your lo mein tonight, smartass.  
  
Mulder’s shoulders are hunched as he inspects whatever arcane thing has his interest. “Please let me be there when you teww Thkinner why yow tounge’th aw thwowwen.”  
  
“Haven’t heard anything from the guys in Felton, I guess,” she says, because this subject is beyond exhausted, batted around out of habit like two old housecats with a weary mouse.  
  
“Nope.” He tucks the loupe and the rock (it looks like a rock, could be a Martian coprolite or the Black Orlov diamond, who knows) into his desk drawer. “I’ll call you if I hear anything, I left them my number.”  
  
Of course you did, of course it’s your case and your division and your goddamned office and – why is she angry?  
  
She’s not, she realizes. She’s bored and looking for stimulation. “Sounds good, just keep me posted. Email me what you get done on the profile tonight too, if you don’t mind.”  
  
“As you wish.” Mulder tips the brim of an imaginary hat. “So where’s this guy taking you?”  
  
“He’s not taking me anywhere,” she says. A bit prim, that, but the distinction’s important. “I’m meeting him at La Chaumiere.”  
  
“Oooh la la,” says Mulder. “French.”  
  
She files a few documents in their clanky old metal drawers, uncomfortable with his interest. “I’m going to go makes some notes on that body they sent over before I head out. I’ll probably see you tomorrow or Sunday, I guess.”  
  
“Au revoir,” Mulder says, sounding like Inspector Clouseau or possibly Julia Child. “Bon appetit.”  
  
She rolls her eyes, annoyed, and brushes past him to retrieve her coat. Mulder must have caught her aura in the slipstream because he grabs the tail of her jacket, tugging her back.  
  
She turns, startled. “What?”  
  
“Have a good time tonight, Scully.” His voice, his eyes, soft. “Really.”  
  
She runs her fingers through her hair, offering him a smile. “Thanks, Mulder. But it’s no big deal. Let me know if anything is up.”  
  
“Helicopters?” he asks slyly, releasing her jacket. “Satellites? Clouds?”  
  
“Good night, Mulder. Don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite.”  
  
“Bon soir, Scully.”  
  
***  
  
She goes for the bottom half of her charcoal skirt suit and a thin sweater the indeterminate blue of skim milk. She runs a wooden comb through her hair to break up the severity of the hairspray, brushes her teeth, re-blacks her golden lashes. Scully knows she’s attractive, that her body is slim and that each pale breast remains high and firm, even if it’s just a handful. She knows her eyes are her best feature, that her lips are crooked but full, and that her long nose is interesting next to the pert Barbie doll features surgeons churn out these days.  
  
She’s come into herself in the past few years, gotten a good stylist and an even better tailor. There’s only Mulder to impress most days, but she’s glad of it anyway. If anyone knows the value of a well-cut suit, it’s Mulder with his careless Armani and Hickey Freeman. It must be nice to grow up with money, with someone to teach you how to do that. The Mulders had more houses than the Scullys had cars.  
  
Her shoes are good now too – she’s up a number of pay grades from her Thom McAns and better quality means higher heels.  
  
She’s always been a sucker for a heel.  
  
As if warding off an evil eye summoned by her frank self-awareness, Scully makes a moue of distaste in the mirror. She pretends the whole evening will be a chore, but the fact is that she’s looking forward to it.  
  
There are too many men in her life, and yet somehow here she is in pursuit of another. But this is someone different, someone sane, someone not bent on destroying himself or her. She is not a talisman to him, she is not a voice in his head or some tight-ass federale come to steal his star. She’s just a woman he’d like to talk to.  
  
Scully grabs a black purse, one of three handbags she owns, and plucks fuzz from the lapel of her black coat. The coat is plain and warm, highlights the autumn gloss of her hair. Scully smiles a little, practices looking engaging. Will she go home with him? She could. She very well might. She thinks of Missy saying redheads should have more fun than blondes  
  
Thinks of Donnie Pfaster and turns away from the glass.  
  
***  
  
At La Chaumiere, Scully’s tucked into the gunfighter’s seat. The stone walls are warm and rosy from the fireplace and the red leather upholstery. She wants desperately to feel indifferent, but finds herself scanning the room for Raphael.  
  
She fidgets with a butter knife, checks her teeth in it while wondering again what made her call. Was it Padgett or Mulder or some unholy combination of the two? She remembers a story she read in college, The Appointment in Samara, and wonders if there are choices.  
  
“Hey,” says Raphael, “you’re not sharpening those, are you?” He bares his incisors.  
  
Jesus. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”  
  
Raphael sits, shrugs his coat over the chair. He’s as handsome as she remembers, like an ad for Scandinavia.  
  
“So what’s this big important government job you have,” he asks, skimming the menu. “You’ve been vague.”  
  
“I work for the FBI,” Scully says, like she’s an independent contractor instead having half an office at the Bureau’s dark heart.  
  
Raphael’s eyes widen and she is inwardly pleased. For all the times the actual job wears her down, she does enjoy the cachet.  
  
“Really?” he asks. “That’s pretty cool. What’s it like?” He taps at something on the wine list when the waitress comes by.  
  
Scully considers this. She pictures the corpse she handled just hours ago, a trypophobic horrorshow of maggot holes and parasitoid wasps. A baby ringneck snake was tucked into the left eye socket. She has concluded that she wants very much to go home with Raphael, to have ordinary sex with an ordinary person. If she can get pregnant she would like to do that too, and would never bother him about it. She wants a baby all her own.  
  
“It’s mostly a lot of paperwork,” she says at last. Washes down the lie with a sip of the Malbec the waitress pours.  
  
Raphael grins; accountants understand paperwork. “So it’s not like Silence of The Lambs?”  
  
Laughs a little at that like it’s the first time she’s heard it. “They must have cut the scenes where Clarice was filling out car rental forms in triplicate.”  
  
“Bummer, I was hoping for lurid tales of the BSU.”  
  
God, she thinks. Everyone thinks they know me after that damned movie. Scully has a faint snobbery of citizens using company lingo. She sees her hand next to the wine bottle and feels detached from it, the soft pink ovals of her nails, the paper cut on the back of her thumb. She watches her fingers pick at a bread crumb on the table. “What kind of accounting do you do?”  
  
A chuckle. “The kind that’s only interesting to other accountants. I’m sort of an itinerant nitpicker checking in on large organizations before getting sent elsewhere. You ready to order?”  
  
His knee bumps against hers when he turns to wave the waitress back over, and Scully is surprised by the tingle that runs down her spine at so brief a contact. She wants pull him on top of her, his bland good looks and inoffensive cologne. She can see his apartment in her mind’s eye: lots of neutral furnishings, abstract paintings with strong masculine shapes. Calvin Klein bedding in blue and gray plaid. He’d have a Water-Pik on the vanity, Architectural Digest and Men’s Health on the coffee table.  
  
They order cassoulet and the roast chicken, which comes with bread and lots of coarse mustard. Scully gets it for lunch sometimes, with Mulder, when they eat real food together. They never order wine.  
  
The waitress, having refilled their water glasses, slips away on legs so white and soft that Scully thinks of breadsticks.  
  
Raphael clears his throat, looking a little uncomfortable. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an arrogant asshole, but I just, uh, I feel like I should be clear on the point that I’m only in town for another few months.”  
  
It would be unkind to tell him this reassures her. “I remembered that when I called,” she says.  
  
“Okay, good, I just…it’s hard. But I guess you travel a lot.”  
  
You have no idea how far I’ve traveled, Scully thinks. I don’t. “I do, yes. It can be exhausting.”  
  
Raphael looks relieved to have found a kindred spirit. “People don’t always realize how stressful it can be,” he says. “It sounds fun, right, seeing the world on someone else’s dime? But trying to have friends, a family…”  
  
“A houseplant,” Scully chimes in.  
  
They share a laugh.  
  
“You probably hear this all the time,” Raphael begins, “but your hair is really something. I love red hair.”  
  
Scully has indeed heard this many times. Red hair seems to encourage people to share their unseemly fantasies. She tenses a little, waiting.  
  
“My little sister loved Anne of Green Gables,” he says. “I read her all the books, a chapter a night. I guess she worked into my psyche.”  
  
Scully likes Anne Shirley too, and approves of this explanation. “How old is your sister?” Please don’t let her be dead or dying or missing or maimed.  
  
“Francesca is…let’s see. Almost 9 years younger than me, so eighteen in May.”  
  
Dear god, he’s an infant.  
  
“Just you two?” she asks, mouthing thank you as the waitress sets their food down.  
  
“I think the big age gap scared them off of trying again. How about you? You have an only-child air about you.”  
  
Scully could tell him second daughter stories, detail the results of her Hogan assessment and Meyers Briggs score. Explain what it’s like to be unremarkable in a military family and become fixated on the idea of shining so bright that even the captain would notice the glow. Instead she laughs like it’s a compliment and says “No, I’m one of four. Third from the top.”  
  
“I always thought it would be fun to be part of a big family,” he says, spearing a chunk of sausage with his fork.  
  
“It has its moments.”  
  
They sit for a while, eating, sizing each other up.  
  
“So did you always want to be an FBI agent?” Raphael asks after a time. “That seems like a big commitment. A round the clock kind of job. “  
  
Scully rests her fork on the plate, wishing anything in her life had an easy answer. “I’m, uh, actually I’m a doctor. I joined the FBI during my residency. It seemed like a good way to help people.”  
  
Raphael lets out a low, impressed whistle. “I have to tell you, I’m developing an inferiority complex here. Is it weird if I ask to see your badge?” He looks shy but earnest.  
  
“This is a first,” she says, but finds the request endearing. Scully pulls it from her bag, then passes it over. The picture’s pretty good.  
  
Raphael flips it open with a near childlike glee. “This is really cool,” he says. “My inner 10 year old is practically peeing himself right now. Raphael Thaler, FBI.”  
  
Scully envies his comfort with himself, with his excitement. She thinks years back to Mulder at NASA, and doesn’t know how to be that way. Everything in her is so carefully measured.  
  
He closes the badge and passes it back to her. “So, is this why you’re single?”  
  
She blinks slowly. “That’s a rather personal question.”  
  
Raphael looks puzzled by her accusatory tone. “Well, yeah, I don’t know much about you yet, so I have to ask personal question. You’re very good looking, you’re obviously intelligent, probably have terrific stories for cocktail parties…so what gives?”  
  
“Well, so, there’s the travel thing,” she stalls.  
  
“Sure.” Expectant silence.  
  
Scully taps her badge against her fingertips, trying to be patient. She’s spent all of two hours with him and he thinks he can just start asking the questions her mother knows better than to bring up? Though her mother had casually brought up the crib again on Tuesday, do you want me to keep it in storage, Dana, I don’t mind of course, I just wanted to know because –  
  
“Dana?”  
  
Gentle sigh. She politely told Congress to go to hell, why is she caving here? She decides to blame Mulder, being as her complex personal life does technically have a lot to do with him. “My partner and I spend so much of our time together, I think it’s hard to have anything left after that, I mean, at the end of the day, for someone else. It’s, um…it’s a strange kind of relationship.”  
  
He nods, looking thoughtful. “Makes sense. Is your partner a doctor too?”  
  
“He has a PhD, but he’s not a medical doctor, no. Mulder’s degree is in psychology.”  
  
“His name is – oh, yeah, FBI agents do the last name thing, right? Should I call you Scully?” He is amused by the suggestion.  
  
Tight smile, when did her last name become so intimate? “I’m off the clock right now, Dana’s fine. So what about you then? What’s your, uh, excuse?” She is not comfortable listing his good qualities for him.  
  
“For me, really, it’s just the travel. I see my apartment in New York maybe 5 or 6 times a year. I enjoy what I do, but I’ll switch gears down the road I guess, give up my nomadic ways.”  
  
“I love New York,” she says, almost shy. It feels touristy to love a place like New York, like she’s a rube who longs to dance on the big pianny at Fay-O Schwartz. What she really loves is the Staten Island Ferry, which her father took them all on when she was a kid. Ellis Island was too expensive on one military income. They had squeezed the six of them into a hotel room for four, split two overstuffed sandwiches at the Carnegie Deli.  
  
“Everyone loves New York!” Raphael enthuses. “I’d never want to live anywhere else when I decide to stop being a gypsy. If I want to get a knish at 2 AM, or hire a transsexual Lucille Ball impersonator, I can do these things.”  
  
“I didn’t know there was much call for transsexual Lucille Ball impersonators,” Scully observes, though she can see the appeal of a 2 AM knish.  
  
“They have lady ones too, whatever you need.”  
  
Scully is aware of her stiffness, her unease with conversations that don’t have a specific outcome in mind. She doesn’t want to be this person tonight. “The first time I ever went I was a kid and my parents took us on this big vacation. I had read in a book that people in New York rode the subway, and I didn’t know quite what that was, but I was excited to do it. In my head I envisioned it as something you sat on, you know, like those twenty-five cent rides outside the grocery store.” She chuckles at the memory, remembering her confusion when the graffiti-ed train had come clanking up.  
  
“Maybe you could visit sometime,” he suggests. Scully startles to feel Raphael’s hand atop her own. His winter sea eyes are crinkled at the corners, and she knows that, like the cops in Felton, he cannot see all the ways things are. He doesn’t know that she is microchipped and tattooed, that she is the mother of stolen, dead things. He doesn’t know that she was herself stolen and dead, that she has been scraped out and touched by things from the stars and that she has spoken with the ghosts she claims not to believe in. He doesn’t know that she is a facade, her own Galatea.  
  
Her eyes take in his square-tipped fingers on her knuckles, the gingham cuff of his Brooks Brothers shirt. She is afraid that she will cry with the frustration, the exhaustion, of having to pretend at normalcy. Her ever-shrinking social sphere has left her stumbling over simple interactions like this. The self pity makes her angry. Resolved.  
  
Scully looks up at him through her sooty lashes, knows she looks fetching and seductive like this. She smiles a little, the way she did at her reflection earlier. “Do you mind if I order another bottle of wine?”  
  
Raphael grins. “Is my company that unbearable?”  
  
Her airy laugh is the one she’d learned as Mulder’s – Rob’s – wife. “Not at all. The fire’s just not keeping me very warm.” She loads the response with as much meaning as she can.  
  
He takes it, and calls the waitress back to bring the check.  
  
***  
  
She lay her damp cheek against Raphael’s chest for a time, listening to the steady rush of his heart until he drifted into a quiet sleep. Scully sits up now, wonders if she will ever feel comfortable being unconscious around another person again. It strikes her as ironic that “sleeping together” is the accepted euphemism for a sexual relationship when it’s one of the more anxiety-inducing situations she can imagine.  
  
Made Rob – Mulder – sleep on the couch in California. (But is that why, Dana? Is anxiety why he was exiled a floor away? What were you really afraid would happen? And how was it any different from those nights at fleabag motels when you shared a sagging bed? But it was, oh, it was.)  
  
Her thighs are sore, she suspects there is blood streaked on them. It feels like she had her hymen broken anew, though not in a bad way. Her mouth is bruised and tender from kissing and wine. She’d forgotten that she likes kissing. It’s more intimate than the act that followed, in a way. Mulder probably knows some Jungian tale about why we eroticize a simulation of devouring our lovers. Kissing implies such trust; teeth and skulls and soft fleshy parts all coming together. Whatever the vernacular may imply, sex scarcely involves bones.  
  
Raphael had his mouth on her hollow gunshot belly, his mouth on the cradle of her hips, his mouth -  
  
She’d lied and said she was on birth control, but he wore a condom anyway. AIDS, paternity suits. These modern times.  
  
Drunk, she’d considered reaching into the trash and…but no. Not quite to that point yet.  
  
Yet.  
  
I’ll just hold onto it a while longer, Dana. It’s a shame Matthew didn’t get to use it, but the shipping would have been outrageous and you know how Tara can be, you’re so beautiful and still young, is it Fox? I’m your mother, you can tell me.  
  
Raphael stirs in the dark and she flinches, drops her head to her drawn knees in something very much like shame. He hadn’t offered to ride the couch like Jerse (he was Ed that night, Dana, he was Jerse when they arrested him) had and that’s fine, it reiterates that this is nothing like that.  
  
She’d been so reckless in Philadelphia, broken and terrified like a wild thing with its leg in a trap. She wanted Ed to yank her free even if she lost the limb.  
  
But this, here, this is okay. They’re in his bed together, no post-coital avoidance, no shame or slinking out. Raphael is bared to where the blanket lays across his hips and she hasn’t got a stitch on either. She hadn’t realized how much she missed sex, that healthy, active people are hardwired for it. She missed the mindless dopamine-serotonin cycle of pleasure; no thinking, no speaking, just action and reaction. Thinks about how she couldn't meet Mulder's eye when she said I think you know me better than that.  
  
Moonlight falls on the night table, her phone next to his with the alarm set. She has to be out of here by 8, ready in case there’s a drive back to Delaware.  
  
Scully unfurls, a night blooming flower, to rise and gather clothes from the floor in anticipation of morning. She drapes them over the armchair, smoothing everything out and, though she knows it’s ridiculous, she tucks her underwear beneath her sweater he way she does at the gynecologist’s office.  
  
The floor creaks and she reaches for her gun.  
  
“Jeeeeesus,” she breathes, mortified. She huffs out a few soothing breaths, waits for the storm surge of adrenaline to recede.  
  
She pads back over to the bed, then sits gently at the edge. Her companion turns, then opens his eyes into the darkness around them.  
  
“Hey,” he says, yawning. “You’re not sneaking out are you?”  
  
She looks past him to the moon, shakes her head.  
  
“Good,” he says. “Come back to bed.”  
  
She closes her eyes for a long blink, wishing he were not awake. It makes her feel vulnerable, out of control. But there’s no helping it, and she lies down on her side, so tense her head barely makes a dip in the pillow. “Good night, don’t let the Feejee mermaids bite,” she murmurs without thinking.  
  
“The what?”  
  
“Nothing, good night.”  
  
Raphael’s hand is heavy as a manacle at her elbow, but slides to the sheet as he drifts back into unconsciousness. Scully stays wide-eyed and alert until she is certain that he is out. He seems an even sleeper, and she does not believe he will stir again until morning.  
  
She dreams that she is swimming, weightless and bare, in the waves beneath the harvest moon.  
  
***  
  
Her eyes open and she is fully awake. There is no disorientation, no morning-after confusion or regret, just a glance at her watch to confirm that she has not overslept. She sees Raphael’s t-shirt on the floor and, moving carefully so as not to put herself in too undignified a position, she retrieves it. She is sitting when she pulls it on, but it seems to come to well down her thighs. She likes wearing a man’s clothes like this, the musky scents of sweat and cologne and deodorant mingling with an undetectable pheromone that calls in a low voice to her animal brain.  
  
Last night was good. There is a very attractive man next to her in the bed, attractive and intelligent and funny. She is satisfied that she does not emit a frequency detectable only to sociopaths and damaged psyches. She can have this, in some way or another, if she chooses it.  
  
Scully yawns widely, hears a little popping sound in her jaw and covers her mouth with the back of her hand. “Excuse me,” she murmurs to no one, a habit from the nuns.  
  
They drank wine last night, a lot of it, and Scully reluctantly swings her legs to the floor to go to the bathroom. The sheets are warm and soft and her eyes ache a bit even though the gray flannel curtains obscure the risen sun. Her mouth is dry, an unpleasant taste in the back of her throat.  
  
The shirt is nearly to the tops of her knees when she stands and she feels childlike in it, her hair rumpled and her eyes sticky with sleep and sweat. She rubs at them with balled fists as she walks to the bathroom, flinching when her feet hit the tile. A chill rises in her, and Scully scuffs her feet on the plush bathmat to warm up.  
  
The toilet seat is cold on her thighs, which are not bloody after all. She runs the tap until the water pouring from the faucet is steaming, then scrubs her hands and face. A folded length of toilet paper makes a serviceable toothbrush. Scully sees her red-knuckled hands on the edge of the basin, the freckles across her nose and cheeks. There are crows’ feet and smile lines to prove she is capable of sustained joy. She helps herself to some of Raphael’s lotion for her face, her lips. She gives herself what Missy called a whore’s bath; soap between her legs, rinsed away with one of the navy washcloths stacked in a basket.  
  
In the bedroom her phone chirps, a muffled sound through the door. She tosses the washcloth into the hamper, hoping the ringer doesn’t wake Raphael, as accountants probably get to sleep in on the weekends.  
  
The phone goes silent as she opens the door.  
  
“’lo? This is Raphael,” he says into her phone. “This better be good.”  
  
Shit.  
  
Mom or Mulder? Frozen on the threshold, she can’t decide which is worse. Oh, Jesus, what if it’s Skinner?  
  
“Oh, gosh,” he says, alert now. “I’m so sorry, I thought this was my…jeez, yeah, Dana’s right here.” He waves the phone at her, looking like a disgraced member of the Norse pantheon.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he mouths, blushing. “Habit.”  
  
Scully shrugs, what’s done is done. She takes the phone with an air of resignation, settles onto the bed. “Hello?”  
  
“Morning, sunshine. Sorry if I woke you.” Mulder, the least of all possible evils.  
  
“You didn’t.”  
  
“Guess your date went well, huh?” So fucking condescending sometimes.  
  
“What’s up, Mulder?” She senses Raphael perk up beside her. She wonders if this makes him uncomfortable at all, her talking to her partner in bed with him, but she doubts it. That’s the sort of neurosis she has. Mustn’t project.  
  
“…around 7,” she hears from her phone, and tunes back into Radio Mulder, the channel that always comes in clearest. “I said we could be there by 11 if we hustle.”  
  
Scully rises to retrieve the clothes she’d prepared in the small hours of the morning. She feels Raphael’s eyes on her and turns to regard him. He makes a gesture to indicate the t-shirt, then gives her a thumbs up. She smiles back. God, this is nice.  
  
“I don’t guess the kid is there,” she asks, tucking to phone between her shoulder and her ear. She steps into her underwear with as much modesty as the shirt can provide. There’s no need to be coy, but she doesn’t want to put on a show, either.  
  
There’s a long pause. “We’re not going to find him,” Mulder says with certainty. “Not until he wants to be found.”  
  
Scully rolls her eyes for no reason other than form’s sake, buttons her skirt. “Can you pick me up in an hour?”  
  
“That enough time?”  
  
She’s positive the question isn’t innocent, but refuses to indulge him this morning. “I need to throw some things in a bag.” Shower, put on clothes that don’t reek of sex.  
  
“I’ll bring coffee.” He sounds…irritated?  
  
She hangs up without saying goodbye, because all of their conversations are really one ongoing conversation with very long pauses in it. She pulls Raphael’s shirt off and tosses it to the bed. Forgoing her bra, she slips her sweater back on, the fine knit so soft against her bare skin. Her nipples tighten at the sensation. Scully ignores it, stepping into her shoes like armor.  
  
“You talk like a cop,” Raphael remarks. “On the phone, I mean. You’re so….clipped.”  
  
Funny, she thought she always sounded like that. “Really?” She tucks her bra into her sleeve like one of Aunt Olive’s lace hankies.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, propping himself up on one elbow. “I can actually imagine you arresting someone now. It’s kind of hot, especially with the heels and no bra.” He winks.  
  
She longs to ask him why, why men have naughty cop fantasies and naughty librarian fantasies and naughty teacher fantasies. But she doesn’t know how, not even with Mulder, and says “Thanks, I think,” instead.  
  
Raphael leans over to grab his boxers from the floor. “I was going to make breakfast,” he tells her as he dresses, “but it sounds like you’re in a hurry.”  
  
Scully shrugs, holds her palms up to say what can you do?  
  
“How about some coffee while I call you a cab? I won’t even spill it on you first.”  
  
That smile could light up a town. “I’d like that.” She retrieves her coat as Raphael grabs his actual phone from the night table. He has the cab company on speed dial too.  
  
He reports that the cab will be 10 minutes, just enough time for a quick cup before she hits the road again. It’s true what she told him, her houseplants always die.  
  
The burbling of the coffee pot, the smell of grounds. Raphael’s kitchen is modern, lots of black and chrome. Some cobalt glassware, which she covets. There’s a sale at Pier One, maybe she’ll go shopping when she gets home. It would be nice to have new wineglasses, just in case…  
  
“…case are you working on?” Raphael asks. “Anything I’d know?” He’s holding a mug out to her.  
  
“Thanks. Um, maybe, but it’s an ongoing investigation. I can’t discuss it right now.” She tries to seem apologetic because his fascination with her badge was so charming.  
  
“Gotcha. I had a good time last night, Dana. And I don’t just mean, you know, after dinner.”  
  
“I did too.” She drinks the coffee, which scalds her mouth. She has an asbestos palate at this point and scarcely notices. “I’m glad I called you.”  
  
“Me too. I wish our schedules were less crappy. Take me up on that New York visit sometime, hmm?”  
  
A horn beeps downstairs, making them both glance at the window. “I’d like that,” Scully says. She really, really would.  
  
They walk to the door, Raphael wearing only boxers and his khakis, the unbelted pants hanging at his hips. “Go catch some bad guys, No Relation,” he tells her as she steps into the hall.  
  
“I’ll do my best.”  
  
“I know you won’t call,” Raphael tells her, his hands in his pockets. “But I really did have a great night. You’re interesting. Even when you don’t say much, you’re interesting.”  
  
The horn beeps again, but she asks why he doesn’t think she’ll call.  
  
He smiles at her, almost indulgent. “Because,” he explains, “you never gave me your number. Trust me, I know a one night stand when I see it.” He kisses her softly on the mouth, then closes the door.


	3. Chapter 3

The shower burns like the coffee did, but it has a ritualistic, purifying feel. She fluffs her hair under the dryer, applies a layer of makeup. The suit she wears is a dark one, a cotton blend that can stand up to the woods, and her shoes are low boots with traction on the sole. She wore them in Texas once.  
  
A change of clothes, her backup toiletry kit, and her cell phone charger go into her overnight bag. Gun in the pancake holster, bag on her shoulder. She’s Agent Scully again now, hard and whip-smart, all tailored and tough and remote.  
  
Her phone rings and it’s Mulder waiting downstairs. She takes the steps two at a time in case she’d gotten soft in the night, her coat flapping behind her like Batman’s cape.  
  
“Morning,” he says after she’s stowed her things in the trunk and taken her usual spot on the passenger’s side. A miniature streetscape is reflected in his sunglasses, and she wishes she had brought a pair too.  
  
She takes the hot paper cup and sniffs the steam. “Thanks.”  
  
He glances in the rearview before pulling out. “Sure.”  
  
They drive in tight silence for half an hour, sipping at their coffee while Mulder barrels along at eighty. Someone should say something, someone should mention the case, someone should crack a joke or get the hiccups, but there is nothing.  
  
Scully always caves before silence. It was the weapon Bill and Melissa had fought her with, to make her feel small and unimportant. “I assume you have the keys,” she ventures.  
  
“Yep.”  
  
Three mile markers, four, five.  
  
"If you have something to say to me, Mulder, then just say it."  
  
“About the keys?”  
  
Asshole. “This morning.”  
  
"What would I say? Your personal life is none of my business."  
  
"Then please don’t get on your high horse because I spent the night with someone and you disapprove.”  
  
“I’m not on a horse.” He stares down the road like he’s aiming a six-shooter. “I don’t know why you’re picking a fight with me, Scully.”  
  
She closes her eyes, draws a long breath before looking down at her lap. The weave of her trousers becomes unspeakably fascinating. “I’m not picking a fight,” she says. “Things have changed.”  
  
“Things?”  
  
It feels like a very long time before she attempts a response. She was in his arms eight days ago, the wash of terror subsiding in his presence, her blood sticky between them. Her heart was so loud he must have heard it, felt it against his chest. She cried great wracking sobs, she never cried like that in front of him. How can he not know things are different? “Things aren’t…we aren’t who we were. There’s been so much-” But maybe she’s just confusing things. Shared trauma can start to feel like kismet. Scully bites her lip, stares out the window. “Never mind. I’m just tired and irritable.”  
  
Mulder sips his coffee, though she suspects the cups is empty and it’s just serving as a prop. “You’re probably hungry.”  
  
She shrugs, emits the vocal equivalent of a shrug, and opens the thick manila file on the console. There will be time for this later, they always have time, have nothing but time for each other. She pages through her reports, looks at beetles and blowflies, at cranberry colored organs. “Tell me about what’s waiting for us. What did they find?”  
  
Sunflower seeds in the cupholder, she notices, and Mulder chews at one. He pops the lid off his coffee cup and spits the hulls in. “Stone and log shack, half sunken into a hill in the woods. Chimney, dirt area that looks like the right size for that truck. Checking the tire tracks this morning, I think. There’s a stream out behind it, a smokehouse.” His voice is strained.  
  
Scully looks at the pictures of the impaled bodies again, looks at the black crescents of dirt under the nails of the first two men. They lived on the streets, they panhandled and drank malt liquor in doorways. What was the connection between them and Pete’s clean hands?  
  
“Didn’t seem like anyone was home? No one Asian?” She wants the source of that hair very much.  
  
“No one answered the door, maybe it was the butler’s day off.”  
  
“So what did you come up with last night? How’s your kobold fitting in here?” She tries not to sound sarcastic; she has a genuine interest in his brain.  
  
A few more seeds down the hatch before he answers. He taps the first two fingers of his left hand on his lips. “I haven’t told you everything.”  
  
He can be so cryptic sometimes; it’s the only trace of vanity he has. His athleticism, his good looks, he seems indifferent to these things, but he likes to know the answers before other people. And he will withhold some of that information at times, which can be maddening.  
  
“Such as…” she prompts.  
  
He says nothing in reply, which means he is waiting for her to put the pieces together. What did he have last night that he didn’t have before? What did he do without her?  
  
Pete’s hands, Pete’s clean hands that made her think he had a house, his tidy car that confirmed he had another place to keep things, the sleeping bag with those few dark hairs caught in it.  
  
Hands. House. Hair.  
  
The hair that belonged to someone Asian, likely someone young. Someone whose hair was kept short, whose hair had fallen out and hadn’t been pulled or tugged in a struggle. Someone who was wrapped in a sleeping bag, but wasn’t moving, who didn’t thrash and writhe and try to break free.  
  
Someone small and still. Maybe someone dead.  
  
“A boy,” she says at last. “The hair belongs to a little boy. Four or five years old.” She has autopsied many children, but never stops hating it. The detachment is harder with their round fingers and cheeks, their rubbery little bones.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
A sense of urgency rises in her. “Then why didn’t you hurry? Why didn’t you have them break down that door? The integrity of the scene doesn’t mean a damned thing if we can save this child.”  
  
Mulder doesn’t meet her eyes. “They did,” he says, his voice low. “I told them my theory, what you found. The boy is dead. There was no point in telling you until now. There was nothing we could do. He’d been dead for days.”  
  
She is breathless, stung. How could he not tell her this, how could he keep such an awful secret from her, how could he let her have a goodbye kiss and a shower without saying a word? His silence, his distance; these things had nothing to do with her. They had to do with another small corpse he’s decided to carry around. She is hurt, betrayed, ashamed…adjectives fail her at this point.  
  
“Mulder,” she says, too shaky for more. She hopes her tone conveys the complexities of her feelings.  
  
“We can help him now, though. You can help him find his way back home.”  
  
She doesn’t need him to tell her the details. She knew, somewhere in her, when he said smokehouse. She knows the boy was in a subterranean room of the house, that he was naked, that Pete would bring him food and water every day while he slept, clean the sanitation area. He’d watch the boy without alerting him. There’d be a kerosene heater in the room, or maybe an electric one run off a jenny. It’s cold at night, and no one had given the boy water for at least a week.  
  
Mulder looks pained watching the understanding come to her. “I’m sorry,” he tells her.  
  
“The smokehouse,” she says. “There were other bodies, weren’t there? Mummified.”  
  
He nods, miserable.  
  
The shock has worn off and she’s angry now, which is an emotion she can use. “You should have told me, you should have called as soon as you realized last night. Jesus, I would have come home. I would have hurried this morning.”  
  
Mulder takes the exit to Felton, and there are split rail fences along the road now. Horses nose in the grass. “Why, Scully? For what? What could you have done? The boy was dead for days, we had no way to find him. You’re entitled to a night off sometimes.”  
  
“You had no right to make that choice for me!” She’s not yelling, but the fury’s there for it.  
  
“I don’t want you lost in this!” Mulder replies, and he is angry too. “You’re hell bent on giving every waking moment to this job, Scully, and you won’t let go. Your sister, Emily, your ova, your brain…what the hell else does it take for you to give yourself some goddamned distance? And that’s just the highlight reel. How’s your gunshot wound, partner? How’s your burning heart?”  
  
“Don’t you dare, Mulder. Don’t you dare infantilize me. You do not make my choices for me, you do not lie to me and you of all people do not give me a lecture on the importance of maintaining a personal life.” She hears her voice, and it is the low, hard tone her father had used when she’d done something very wrong.  
  
They’re at the top of a dirt track, and there’s a cop waiting for them in a Jeep. He waves, and Mulder waves back.  
  
He turns to her after parking the car beside the guardrail. “You are my personal life,” he says, checking his gun. “You were right. Things have changed.”  
  
A hundred flip replies die on her lips. “What do you mean?” is the best she can muster.  
  
Mulder unbuckles his seatbelt, opens the door, and sits in the rush of chilly air. “I mean the only place I wanted to be last night was eating lo mein with you.”  
  
There is too much information to process, why is it always like this with them? Why do they open up in times of crisis? They’re a couple of masochists, bent on dying from ten thousand tiny wounds. Her throat is choked with everything she can’t say to him, with the ghosts of Texan bees, with lullabyes she will never sing.  
  
“Shit,” Mulder says, misconstruing her silence.  
  
“It could have been fajitas,” she manages, a notch above a whisper.  
  
He looks relieved. Almost. “I’ve…I’ve got my own issues. I think you’ve saved me from the worst of them, from the worst of myself. But Scully, there has to be something else for you.”  
  
The cop in the Jeep starts walking over, and Mulder gets out of the car with his back to her. “Hey, sorry. Just getting ourselves in order. We ready to go?” He’s a Fed again, all else cast aside.  
  
Scully, turmoil bottled for later decanting and analysis, joins them.  
  
“I never saw anything like this. That sick fucking bastard, I hope that motherfucker burns in hell.” He notices Scully, tips his hat. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.”  
  
She looks at the Jeep. “That our ride?”  
  
“Yes ma’am, it is. It’ll be bumpy, I hope you don’t get motion sick.”  
  
“She’s not the one to worry about,” Mulder says, as they settle in to the worn seats.  
  
“I got officers been doing this for twenty years had to walk away, Agent Mulder. What kind of a person does something like this? I guess you two see this sort of thing a lot, but there’s no precedent here, I can tell you that. We’re gonna have reporters all over the damn place.” The car lurches over rocks, tree roots, up an embankment.  
  
Scully lets her eyes slide closed, her body moving with the Jeep, the wind. How strange that she woke up with Raphael this morning, how strange to have such duality in her. Now that she’s here she cannot imagine a life with someone who doesn’t look also into the abyss.  
  
***  
  
The police of Felton and the Delaware state troopers aren’t the only ones who have never seen anything like this. There are over twenty boys in the basement rooms, all four to five years old by her estimation, though many are badly deteriorated. They will need a forensic anthropologist for the oldest ones.  
  
The boys are of all races, their smooth baby skin tight and puckered like little old men. The eyes are withered shut, the small fists tightly curled. It is so sad and unbearable that Scully has to fight a strange urge to cuddle their drawn limbs like swaddled infants.  
  
She and Mulder leave the techs to tag and bag, to photograph and sketch and lay gridlines. Like Ariadne and Theseus they navigate the warren of rooms, mindful not to disturb anything as they go.  
  
An officer is crouched next to a small form covered by a white sheet and she and Mulder know together that this is the boy who died while they treated Pete like an innocent. Gently, as though the child is only asleep, the officer folds back the sheet.  
  
Scully steps hard on the pain it causes her, this child curled so much like her own dead girl at the same age. Mulder puts a hand to her back and she knows that no one else can ever touch her that way. It steadies her, he steadies her, and she crouches down beside the body.  
  
The officer passes her a pair of gloves, then leaves. Maybe he has a kindergartener too. Scully runs her finger along the slim column of the little boy’s throat. It is circled by a leather thong. His almond eyes are sunken.  
  
“I think the other two were his suppliers,” Mulder says in a quiet voice. “I think it’s where Pete went on his trips away. That keychain came from a place right off 95.” Children can be bought if you know the right rock to look under.  
  
“Clean hands,” Scully murmurs. She strokes the boy’s hair, and it looks like the strands she found in the sleeping bag. She covers him back up with the sheet, hoping he was dreaming when the end came. “He sacrificed them to himself.”  
  
“I should have told you,” Mulder says. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Thank you,” though she understands. She remembers Roche, years ago, drinking in Mulder’s suffering like a good single malt. How she would have taken that pain for him if she could have.  
  
Mulder holds a hand to her, pulls her up from the floor. “They’re going to bring him to the morgue in a bit, figure we may as well start where the evidence is freshest.”  
  
“Your kobold,” Scully says. “You think he was avenging these boys?”  
  
Mulder shrugs, looks at the sad shape on the ground. “It’s the story I like best right now.”  
  
“Me too. But we’ll keep looking.”  
  
“We’ll keep looking.”  
  
They stand there for a while, Scully with her arms crossed at her chest, Mulder’s hands in his pockets. Sunlight streams in where the officers smashed in the heavily padlocked door.  
  
“It’s going to be days before they finish with this place,” Mulder says. “You want it shipped home or you want to stick around and help?”  
  
Scully looks up at him, feeling miniscule in her flat boots. His eyes are the strange changeable green of the Atlantic. She takes the whole of him in there, his abiding sadness, his strange joys and his fierce love for her. Her mistake had been to simplify him, to try and pigeonhole him neatly in her life. But she sees now that he has, for better or worse, become her life. She has her definition now.  
  
“Stick around,” she replies. “They can’t see what we can.”  
  
***  
  
She showered twice, once at the morgue and once at the hotel. She thinks the smell is gone now, the mix of decay and smoked flesh and formalin. Half a bottle of Listerine got it out of her mouth and the back of her throat, but she can taste the memory of it. Her back aches from bending over a half dozen little bodies, all she had time and psychological stamina for today.  
  
There were two rooms available this time, and she lays beneath the ugly polyester bedspread, thinking of Raphael. Was it really last night that she’d gone to bed with him, tossed her clothes on his floor and considered conceiving his child if she could?  
  
Is that what she really wants? Mulder was right earlier, hasn’t she learned anything? To love something is to put it at risk.  
  
But not him, not them. They exist like Escher’s hands, one drawing the other, so intertwined that the first can’t be destroyed without also destroying the second. She should not bring anyone else in, maybe Mulder had it backwards.  
  
She tosses in the bed, hears the coils (the mice?) squeak in protest. Sleep will not come tonight, she knows. Scully sits up, her pajamas blue tonight, her hair wavy without a blowdry. She feels around for her slippers, mindful of athlete’s foot in these places. She works her feet into them, goes to her coat for some pocket change. There is a soda machine down the hall, she remembers, and a Diet Coke sounds good right now. Maybe it will fuel productivity.  
  
Scully puts the key and the money into the little pocket on her pajama top and pads out into the hall. The cheap door shuts behind her with a hollow thump. The air is cold out here, but the urge for caffeine drives her forward. The machine carries Pepsi rather than Coke, but she’ll take any port in a storm.  
  
She starts back to her room then pauses, turning the other way. Mulder’s room is two doors over, by the fire escape. They should talk, which she hates even more than not talking. She swallows a gulp of night air, buys a second can of soda, and heads to his room.  
  
Her knock echoes in the dingy hall and she glances around, self-conscious.  
  
“Hey,” Mulder says when he answers, looking rumpled but alert. “You’re a week early for trick or treat.”  
  
“Room service,” she says, holding out the second can.  
  
“Wow, it’s like you have ESPN or something.”  
  
She hands it to him before walking under his arm. “They were out of lo mein, sorry.”  
  
“Fajitas? We could get chicken.”  
  
“Afraid not.” She sits on the bed and opens her drink. “Why aren’t you asleep?”  
  
“Oh, I was, but the lady down the hall made all this racket at the soda machine, then comes pounding on my door.” He takes a long swig of his Pepsi.  
  
“What a bitch.”  
  
“She’s not so bad when you get to know her,” Mulder confides. “When she warms up to you. She’s like a cat.”  
  
Scully laughs a little, thumbs the tab on her can. “I had a good time last night, with Raphael.”  
  
Mulder sits next to her. “Raphael? You can’t be serious, real people aren’t named Raphael.”  
  
“He was. Is. Fox.”  
  
“Fox is weird, it’s not pretentious.”  
  
No one deflects like we do, she thinks. “It’s pretentious. But in any case, I’m glad I went.”  
  
“Evidently,” Mulder says, but she senses no sarcasm.  
  
“What I’m saying is…” she trails off, thinking. “What I need you to understand is that I am not feeling self pity or shame right now. I went out on a date with someone and I went home with him and it felt right. He is exactly the kind of person I could see myself with.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“And last night, and this morning, I was thinking to myself the same thing that you said earlier, that I need a buffer. I need a non-FBI space in my life.” She takes another sip of her drink, lets the bubbles fizz themselves out on her tongue.  
  
“If this is because of what I said in the car, if I made you uncomfortable, I apologize.”  
  
She stares at her thumbs, a small chip in the baby pink polish. “Let me finish. And then when you picked me up, when you told me about that boy, I felt like I had missed out. I felt so cheated, so out of the loop after a twelve-hour stretch.”  
  
Mulder rubs the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He looks worn out. “It was a hard call. I may have made the wrong one.”  
  
She shakes her head, frustrated with herself. “Mulder, it’s not about that. It’s that when I’m away from what we do, I feel like my life is unsatisfied, that there’s some vital piece I’m missing and need find. But when I’m in the thick of it, there’s a sense of completion, of fulfilment. I don’t miss anything when I’m doing my job.” That wasn’t so bad, was it? Although she can’t decide if they are actually exchanging any information.  
  
“Do you think that’s because it satisfies you or distracts you, Scully? That’s where my concern lies.”  
  
Sometimes it’s hard to remember if he’s her friend, her partner, or her psychologist. Or whatever other thing maybe sprouting up between them like a seedling in a sidewalk crack.  
  
“What I’m trying to say, Mulder, is that I think I’m past the Rubicon here. I think my life has become centered on my career in a more profound way than I ever could have predicted. And you’re an integral part of that.”  
  
“The Rubicon, huh? Alea iacta est?” He gives her a lopsided grin.  
  
“God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” she quotes.  
  
He bumps her shoulder with his. “You always did know your Einstein.”  
  
She smiles back, unpracticed. “I don’t mean anything as trite as fate. I just, I think we have shared experiences that have given us a bond that can’t be experienced with anyone else.”  
  
Mulder gazes down at his empty can, nodding slowly. “Goddamned Padgett with his book. Why did you believe him, Scully?”  
  
She tips her head back, searches the ceiling for an answer. “I don’t know. Maybe what he said was true. Maybe I was flattered by his attention, maybe I liked the idea of someone understanding me.”  
  
“No one could ever possibly understand you,” Mulder says with infinite tenderness, and it is the finest compliment she has ever received.  
  
“He understood a lot,” Scully tells him, and lets him infer which things they were.  
  
His expression informs her that he infers correctly. “Hollman, remember that guy? He thought you were a babe, Scully.”  
  
Scully considers Hollman’s taste in women and isn’t sure this is praise. “You and Sheila made a pretty cute couple.”  
  
“Yeah, love ‘em and leave ‘em. I can’t be tied down.” Mulder yawns, stretching his arms over his head. “I’m pretty sure I’ve developed a powerful immunity to caffeine. Gotta hit the sack.” He rubs her back for a couple of seconds, his hand closer to her bra strap than her tattoo.  
  
She is wired, unable to imagine how he can sleep. Her mind is full of him, of the dead children, of Ed Gein and Rosalia Lombardo. “Okay,” she says, inching her toes to the ends of her slippers.  
  
Mulder stretches out on the bed, facing her, curled on the driver’s side. “I’m glad you came by,” he tells her. “Today was hard.”  
  
It was. It was one of the hardest days, and that’s saying something by their standards. She decides there’s nothing to lose tonight, and takes a chance. She stretches out on her usual side of their shared bed, facing him this time. She props her tousled head on her left hand, looking down. It is strange to see him from the top.  
  
“Camping out?”  
  
“For now. Do you mind?  
  
“Nope.” He closes his eyes.  
  
Mulder’s lashes are dark against his cheeks, long as colt’s. A five o’clock shadow gives him a roguish look, and she thinks about it scraping against the soft skin between her shoulder and her ear, his familiar scent being absorbed into her hair.  
  
“So are we going steady, Scully?” he asks. “Are we heading out for a malted after you finish dismantling corpses?”  
  
She blushes, and suspects he keeps his eyes closed as a favor to her. “Are you familiar with Young’s experiment?”  
  
“Help me out, science lady.”  
  
She switches into lecture mode. “It’s also commonly called the double-slit experiment.”  
  
“I think I saw that one on the Playboy Channel.”  
  
She rolls her eyes. “Thomas Young conducted an experiment to determine whether photons behave as a wave or a particle.”  
  
He looks at her now. “I actually, yeah. I think I do know this one. Something about an interference pattern?”  
  
“Right. You set up an experiment where you fire a stream of photons through board with a slit in it, where they then hit a photosensitive background. As each photon hits the background, it makes a white spot. Your result is a vertical column of white dots, which makes sense because a photon is a particle and each particle makes a discrete mark. But then you add a second slit in the board. And you fire the stream of photons again, one photon at a time. You’d expect two vertical columns on the background, right?”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“But that’s not what you get. Now you get a wave interference pattern, a series of light and dark bars showing that the photons, which acted like particles a minute ago, are now acting like waves and particles simultaneously. They interfere with each other like waves, but leave discrete imprints like particles.”  
  
Mulder thinks for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I’m with you.”  
  
“And the very existence of the interference pattern means that each photon goes through both slits, while also going through neither slit. And, by definition, it must also be interfering with itself to create an interference pattern, since you’re only firing one photon at a time.” She feels satisfied, the way she always does after a scientific explanation of something strange and beautiful.  
  
“So….okay. So why not check? Why not put like a camera or some physics detector thing to see where it goes?”  
  
“They did,” Scully confirms, pleased with him. “And the photons knew it.”  
  
“What the hell does that mean?”  
  
“It means that when the physicists tried to figure out how the photons went through both slits at the same time, they went back to behaving like particles. No more interference pattern. Just two vertical columns, like you’d expect from the single-slit experiment.” Scully drops her head to the pillow, eye level with Mulder. Their noses are a foot apart.  
  
“Why do they do that?”  
  
“Photons like their privacy.”  
  
His smiles warms her. “So tell me the moral of your tale.”  
  
“The moral is that sometimes trying to define a thing only makes it less understandable. Maybe I’ll go to the sock hop with you, maybe we’ll shoot Flukemen and discover the key players in an ongoing government conspiracy determined to confuse the hell out of us at every turn.”  
  
Mulder inches closer, his breath stirring her hair. “I could live with that.”  
  
“Yeah, I think I can too.” Out of habit, she turns on her side so that her back is to him. “I’m tired,” she says, and discovers that it is true.  
  
Mulder shifts, wrapping his left arm around her. His cheek against her neck is exactly as she’d imagined it.  
  
“Hey, Scully?” His hand covers much of her forearm, his fingers making circles at her wrist.  
  
“Yep?”  
  
“Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom?”  
  
“Because…” She is drifting off, some restless thing in her quieted. “I don’t know. Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom, Mulder?”  
  
“The p is silent.”  
  
She laughs, feeling the solid weight of him behind her. There is nothing sane in their relationship, nothing safe or rational or stable save for the surety that nothing will ever be safe, rational, or stable. They are waves canceling each other out, magnifying one another’s strengths. They are particles, leaving pinpricks of light in the incomprehensible dark.


End file.
